Introduction to “the beauty of it all”

Hello,

Well, my first blog post ever. Figured it was about time I started posting some actionscript tips I have learned along my flash and flex learning journeys. It is a great way to share knowledge (both for you, the reader, hopefully, and myself as well. This as some of you may give your own take on the subjects). My goal is start with relatively basic tasks, and build up to more complex examples involving Papervision and such – that this blog could help one learn how to code in Flash, as I feel there are fundamentals that are glazed over when it comes to teaching the basics of Flash. The truth is, that all the coolest tricks in Flash go far beyond simple tweens and buttons and right into leveraging actionscript into creating and customizing your own effects. But there are fundamentals that will make yours, and others you may work with in the future, lives easier when working in Flash and Flex projects. I will try my best throughout all my blog posts to make the three following rules a point of focus in all my tutorials:

  1. putting no more code than, maybe “stop();” on the Flash timeline.
  2. highly organized structure of all assets used in the creation of projects.
  3. object oriented programming (using an event-driven model).
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It is important to stay away from the allure of putting code on the timelines as it is harder to change that code later, and Flex itself, will not recognize any timeline code on embedded movieclips (best to get used to it in Flash so there are no nasty surprises in Flex). Proper organization of all flash projects is essential in making everyone’s lives easier when it comes to re-tooling projects or changing things. And if all the coolest effects are programmatic then it would be best to follow, arguably, the cleanest and most easily understandable coding practises – this would be object-oriented programming or OOP for short. And seeing as how Flash and Flex are both built upon the concept of “something” triggering an event that will cause some other code to execute, it would be ideal to push the event-driven model of coding, as well, from the beginning.

I will not go into more detail about what these concepts are precisely at this time, as they can easily googled (here you go); but as I post more tutorials it will be easier to help explain them with examples.

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Feel free to comment with some of your own ideas on what Flash and Flex are about. In the meantime I will start work on my first “actual” post about setting up Flash projects and linkages between flash library items (symbols) and actionscript classes that will define their behaviour. Hopefully I will get it up soon 🙂

Here are a couple of great Flash/Flex learning resources in the meantime:

take care everyone, and happy flashing/flexing haha,
~ anthony

p.s. I am still working on tweaking the design of this blog so please bear with me 🙂

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